Author: Chad de Alva

Chad de Alva is a FAA approved drone pilot, filmmaker and photographer based out of Flagstaff, Arizona. Born and Raised in Telluride, Colorado, Chad has grown up exploring and adventuring all over the Southwest. Before GoPro cameras were a thing, Chad was the guy duct-taping and jerry-rigging cameras to himself and his friends to document their adventures. Cameras may or may not have been lost or killed in action along the way, but cameras can be replaced—experiences cannot. Today, Chad’s work has taken him from the Alaska Range to the bottom of the Grand Canyon working with companies like the BBC and Nat. Geo. to help tell stories that move people. Chad combines his engineering background with his outdoor experience to develop innovative solutions for documenting adventures in never before seen ways. His love of the outdoors, adventure, and learning new things is limitless.
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2017 Klim Cow Tag

I never knew that motorcycle trail advocacy could be so much fun.  For me, trail advocacy has always meant being the boots on the ground and swinging a hand tool playing in the dirt to build or maintain trails.  Working dirt is good fun, but we all know that it’s more fun to ride a trail than build it.  Yet, the folks at Klim have figured out how to make riding trails something that directly benefits trail advocacy:  Enter Klim’s Cow Tag event.  Now in its third year, the Cow Tag event brings in riders from all over North America to ride in Klim’s backyard trail system, win great prizes, and most importantly to raise money that goes to trail advocacy groups like The Blue Ribbon Coalition and the Idaho Trail Machine.

THE EVENT

If you’re wondering how Klim, whose gear has awesome names like ‘Drifter’, ‘Badlands’, and ‘Oculus’, decided on ‘Cow Tag’ for an event name, let me explain.  The event works like this:  At registration, you’re given a map of the entire trail system that has the locations of a bunch of cow tags (literally the things you see fixed to a cow’s ear) sprinkled all over it.  During the event, your objective is to ride to as many tags as you can and record the number written on the back of the tag.  Each tag is worth a certain number of points, and the end of the day the number of points you collect determines how many raffle tickets you get.  You’re then free to put your raffle tickets in a drawing to win gear from a number of awesome brands who all support trail advocacy.

THE TRAILS

The Big Hole Mountain trail system is something you can’t truly appreciate until you sampled some of this world class single track in the Caribou Targhee National Forest.  Ribbons of single track are laced over this awesome country by folks who clearly see the world through a dirt biker’s pair of goggles.  Hundreds of miles of trails climb to rocky ridge lines with stunning views and then drop into winding canyons that look like they came straight out of Middle Earth.  Trails thread their way through tunnels in the forest and along the sides of mountains.  There are no fall zones and snowfields, log and creek (read: river) crossings and technical moves innumerable – in short it’s a singletrack paradise.

This trail system has something for everyone.  From fast and flowy to hard-enduro technical, your dream trail is out there.  The folks at Klim have graded all of the trails for the event from green to double black on a difficulty scale (think ski area trail ratings).  Greens are typically two-track trails that are open to ATV’s too.  Don’t let that fact discourage you – ATVs tend to carve out perfectly-bermed turns that are an absolute hoot on a dirtbike.  Blue trails range from fast and flowy to easier technical moves and some exposure thrown in for good flavor.  My riding buddies and I spent most of our time on blues, and we were blown away by just how many miles of awesome trail are in this system.  Single blacks are where things start to get fun, as these trails have mandatory technical moves, and depending on which way you’re going on a trail some rather fun ledges and other obstacles to climb.  Double blacks are where you’re going to find the exposure and technical moves that can mean bad things if you blow a line.  One of the double blacks we sampled was a goat track across a very steep slide slope, and it took everything four guys had to recover a bike that slipped off the trail.

THE BIG PICTURE

Klim’s Cow Tag event is the best trail advocacy experience I’ve had in my life – and I’m fortunate enough to live in a community where we get to build new dirtbike trails with the forest service every year.  Roughly 300 riders participated in this year’s event, and judging by the dusty, smiling faces I saw everywhere at the end of the day – I know everyone had a great time.  And, all of the riders that participated in the Cow Tag can feel good about the fact that not only did they have a great day of riding, but they’ve helped to make sure that places like the Big Hole Mountain trail system stay open to dirtbikes.

Trail advocacy is something that everyone who recreates outdoors needs to be involved in.  Whether you’re on two wheels or four, if you value the trails that you utilize, then you need to support or, better yet, get involved with an organization that’s working to ensure your access to our nation’s trails.  If we don’t get involved, we will only loose access to the trails and trail systems that we all love riding.  Klim has created something brilliant in the Cow Tag event – they made trail advocacy something that is a ton of fun to participate in.  They’ve found great companies and organizations to partner up with to help make this event possible, and it’s my sincere hope that other companies, clubs, and organizations will follow suit to host events like the Cow Tag all over the place.  The more folks that get involved in trail advocacy, the better the odds are that world-class trail systems like the Big Hole Mountain trail system will be open for years to come.  Do yourself a favor – if you can travel to one place to ride next year, go to the Cow Tag event.

Thanks to Adam, Kenny, Stephen, and Christian for letting me continually stop the ride to take photos.  Thanks to all of the awesome folks at Klim and all of the other organizations that put on an outstanding event for a great cause.

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Meet the Maker

When I was a child, I often found myself wishing there was a tool that I could use to create the all of the random things that a child’s mind could conjure up.  One day I would find myself wishing for some LEGO piece that I didn’t have, and on another, I needed one more part for some project I was working on.  Yet, now that I’m an adult this tool that I’ve opined for since my youth exists, and it’s called a 3D printer.  Specifically, it’s called the TAZ 6, made by Loveland Colorado-based LulzBot.  With the TAZ 6, I can create nearly anything that I can dream up, and that capability allows me to solve a world of problems and improve countless experiences for myself and others.  This is the first part in of a series of articles that will teach you how to use a 3D Printer and how to create things that will be of value to you.  Let’s dig in.

The TAZ 6 is an amazing machine, and working with it is hands down the best 3D printing experience I’ve ever had.  In a few minutes, you can have the printer unboxed, setup, and working on your first print.  Bed leveling, filament profiles, and all of the other things that can take up so much time and scare away new users are all automatically handled by the printer.  The TAZ 6 also has a massive print volume (280mm x 280mm x 250mm) that allows you to print some truly impressive things.  Just type 3D printer into Google, and take a look at the print volumes of a few other printers on the market and you’ll get what I’m on about.  Not only is the feature list on the TAZ 6 impressive, but the underlying support for the printer is outstanding as well.

A self-leveling bed, and a nozzle wiper are just a few of the features that making printing with the TAZ 6, a great 3D printer experience.

A massive print volume lets you print a number of parts all in one go.  To see what these parts make, look below.

In a world where more and more products are made and supported overseas, LulzBot printers are designed, built, and supported in Colorado.  If you have a question, LulzBot has great tech support that is just a phone call or email away to answer any questions you may have.  I can’t emphasize just how valuable this support is.  In the time that I’ve had the TAZ 6, I’ve made numerous calls to LulzBot and challenged their tech support folks with questions where I pretended to be a clueless newbie, on up to advanced topics looking for that last fractional bit of performance in a perfectly dialed filament profile.  In case you guessed where this is going, every correspondence I had was a great and helpful experience.  Rest assured, that if you’re new to this, the folks at LulzBot will help you succeed.

If you’re the type of person who loves to experiment and tinker, a few clicks in Cura, the printer companion software, will open up all of the expert settings for the printer where you can tweak and experiment to your heart’s content.  The entire LulzBot ecosystem is open-sourced and LulzBot provides you all of the part files and software code for you to play with at will.  Speaking of printer parts, the only thing that I can find on the TAZ to complain about is the design of the filament roll holder—and this is a very minor nit-picking complaint.  The filament roll holder will loosen its self when you move it to the open position, and when you place your roll of filament on the holder, the holder will now slip down the printer frame.  It’s nothing that a quick snugging with an allen wrench can’t fix, but it’s one extra thing to keep tabs on.

The TAZ 6 is made from a number of 3D Printed parts.

How It Works:

The TAZ 6 is what’s called a Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) 3D Printer.  This type of printer extrudes a melted filament onto a build surface, and just like a skyscraper is built floor-by-floor, the printer extrudes the filament layer-by-layer to create your part.  The printing process is actually pretty easy; first you use computer design software to design your part or you can download a pre-designed file from a website like thingverse.com Once you have your part(s) designed or downloaded, you load your model(s) into the printer software, where the model is sliced—think of making a plan for each floor in the skyscraper.  From there you take the sliced print file and load it into the printer, and just as a skyscraper is built from the garage to the penthouse, the printer lays down the successive layers of filament to create your print.

This “Heart Gear” can be downloaded on thingverse.com!

Designing A Thing:

You can use any Computer Aided Design (CAD) program that can output a .STL file to design your things.  Some great, free, open-source options are Blender and FreeCAD.  Or you can use a purchased program like SolidWorks.  Whatever program you choose, there are a few things that you need to bear in mind when you’re designing a thing.  Since FFF printers build things layer-by-layer from the print bed up, any part of your print that has an overhang needs to be carefully considered.  The best practice is to print at angles that are 45 – 90 degrees from the print bed.  Yet, if you need to print something that has features that are less than 45 degrees from the print bed, the printer software can add in support material to support the overhanging features as they’re printed.

The same “T” printed with and without support material.  The “supported T” with part of the support material removed is shown below:

Just as scaffolding is used to support a structure that is being built, support material will hold up the overhanging elements of your print.  Another way that you can avoid overhangs is to change the orientation of the print on the print bed as shown below.  With proper orientation, you can avoid bridging gaps and overhangs that would otherwise create filament spaghetti.  As long as you consider how the model you’re designing or downloading is actually going to be printed, you can print just about anything.

The photo above shows how the printer will handles various overhangs.  Angles and radii will produce good results (as shown on the “O” and the “V”), but you’re gambling when you bridge a gap, (note the sagging, shown on the “H”) and you will make filament spaghetti if you start printing into thin air (like on the “T”).  The best way to print these parts would be to lay them down on the print bed as shown below:

A TAZ 6 changes how you see the world.  Where you would historically find yourself scratching your head to solve a problem, you’ll now go print the thing you need to solve your problem.  Here are few exmples of things that I’ve made with the TAZ 6 to solve problems and challenges out in the world and around the home.

Broken Oven Parts

A good buddy was repairing an old oven when he accidentally broke the parts that held on the door cover.  His first reaction was to google for replacement parts, but his oven is no longer made, and parts were not stocked anywhere.  With a handful of broken parts, he came to me and asked if I could reverse engineer a few new brackets for him.  With a pair of calipers and a few revisions to make sure I had the dimension exactly the same as the original, I was able to create a replacement part that worked out great.

Gamut Roller

Another case of parts no longer being made for a given product, I 3D printed a few of these chain rollers to replace the factory one when it broke.  In less than an hour, I had measured the broken part, drawn it in CAD and had the TAZ 6 working away on a couple of new rollers.

Phantom Angel Box

This is a great example of how awesome a large build volume is.  I use this tool to place my expensive drone batteries at a storage voltage, because drone batteries are very particular about what cell voltage they’re left at.  This tool uses delicate lightbulbs, and has a number of parts that have to go with it, so a box that organizes everything and protects the tool was an obvious thing to make.  Now I have one easy to transport box that protects my kit.

Nalgine Thread to Sea-To-Summit Adapter

Ever wanted to make one thing mate to another thing?  With a TAZ 6, you can easily whip up an adapter to mate your water filter to an awesome ultra light water bag from Sea-To-Summit.

3D printing is an amazing technology that is really only limited by your imagination in terms of the problems you can solve and the things you can print.  There are folks out there who use 3D Printing to make everything from wearable StormTrooper armor to prototype parts for vehicle restoration – the applications are quite limitless.  At the top of the pile of desktop printers is the TAZ 6 – its just that good of a printer, and I’ve never had a better experience with a 3D printer in the five plus years I’ve been using them.  Add in the support from the folks at LulzBot and the open source community, and the TAZ 6 becomes an even more valuable tool.

In the next article in this series, we’re going to be using the TAZ 6 to make few things for another American Adventurist member to show how the TAZ 6 3D printer is an invaluable tool for our community.

For more information on the TAZ 6, or the other printers that LulzBot makes, head over to lulzbot.com.  Not all filaments are created equal, and the reason the TAZ 6, is about as close to plug-and-play as you can get a 3D Printer to be is because LulzBot carefully chooses, tests, and then creates dialed filament profiles for the filaments they’ve found to work well.  Save yourself the hassle, wasted time and materials and use the filaments they recommend, which you can check out here.  We’ll talking more about filament choices in the next article.  For reference:  All BLACK filament appearing in this article is PolyLite PLA.  All RED and NEON GREEN filament in nGen.  All ORANGE filament is Inova-1800.  If you have questions on any of this stuff, get in touch with the folks at LulzBot, and they’ll help you out.

Stormtrooper image from Google.